


close to bone

by Sorrel



Series: Best Laid Plans [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Canon Bisexual Character, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Multi, a triangle in nature, an assassin and a thief and a pyro walk into a bar, no ship like partnership, the pair with the plan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 01:16:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7132199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Leonard has about three minutes to make peace with the fact that he’s going to die.</i>
</p><p>In which Canary and Heatwave effect a dashing last-minute rescue, and Leonard quickly learns that the Sara and Mick who come to take him home aren’t quite the same people who left him behind on the platform.  He doesn’t know, yet, how exactly they’ve changed without him- but he’s damned sure he’s going to figure it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	close to bone

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think I have ever marathoned writing a fic quite as hard as this one. Damn.

After Sara seals the door behind her, Leonard has about three minutes to make peace with the fact that he's going to die.

There’s still a chance that the Time Master goons will break through the door. If they do, he has Sara’s purloined laser rifle slung over his shoulder (she left it with him since she couldn’t carry it and drag Mick at the same time), but Leonard judges it unlikely that he’ll need to use it. He can hear faint scrabbling noises on the other side of the ice, but no cracks have appeared. The phasers are all very well and good for shooting people dead, but a pulse rifle would have been a better choice to break through the ice. Thankfully, Time Master goons are apparently all idiots, so Leonard will likely be left alone to blow himself up in peace.

There are worse ways to go out, he supposes, than being vaporized in a very large explosion. At least it’ll be instantaneous; he probably won’t feel much of anything at all. Just a few minutes alone with his thoughts and then, boom, no more Leonard. It could definitely be worse.

He has the sense that he’s probably supposed to be reflecting on his life and his works, the legacy he’ll leave behind and all that, but his brain has no sense of grand drama and is busy spooling through inconsequential details instead: did he pack away his stuff before he left so the next hard burn in the _Waverider_ won’t scatter it all over the floor; does Lisa know how to find his stash house; did he manage to get his ring in Mick’s pocket or did he fumble it in his haste. Details that don’t particularly matter now one way or another, but the habits of a lifetime are hard to break.

He glances down at his feet, but he can’t see the glint of silver anywhere. Probably he got it onto Mick, then. Unless it dropped down into the wellspring. In which case it’s officially a lost cause.

As if it wouldn’t be a lost cause either way.

People reflect over their regrets when faced with death, don’t they? The problem is that Leonard very rarely lets himself have regrets. Make your choices and live with the consequences, that’s his motto, and if things don’t always turn out the way he expects, well, he at least tries to make the best choice he can with the information he has available at the time. He doesn’t regret leaving Mick behind, because Mick was too dangerous not to. He doesn’t regret not killing him, either, because it worked out and Mick came back to them, however rocky the transition. He doesn’t regret pulling his gun on Sara- he did, afterward, but then he apologized, and that was settled. He regrets a little that he didn’t get to say goodbye to his sister, but he knows Mick will do it for him. Or Sara, she’s the dutiful type.

Sara. He _does_ regret that he didn’t do something there a little sooner. He was thinking about it the night before, when they were playing cards in her room- everyone else was off either celebrating or seeing to Savage, and they were about as unlikely to be interrupted as they’d ever get. She was thinking about it too, he could tell- her gaze kept wandering, down to his mouth, or his shoulders, or his hands, and the set of her jaw was very _I’m about to do something stupid._ He regrets that he fell back on a lifetime habit of triple-checking his safety net, instead of just taking the chance and _going_ for it. What’s the worst that would have happened, she told him no? He thinks he knows her well enough by now to know that she’d have been kind about it, in her way, and she wouldn’t have let it change anything. Best case scenario, he would have finally gotten her under him, gotten to bite at her pale pink lips and suck on her tongue and slip his hands under her shirt and have her slide his jacket from his shoulders just the way he’d imagined a million times.

(At least until the Time Masters showed up to ruin everything.)

It’s always the things you _don’t_ do, like he told her, which keeps his list fairly short. He hasn’t made a career of holding back once he decides he wants something. Only twice, really, where it’d approached anything more than idle wishfulness. And Sara was always the most likely not to end horribly. Leonard likes a long shot, but he’s not one for tilting at windmills, either.

The tenor of the noise on the other side of the wall changes, and Leonard cocks his head as he hears the muffled boom of a pulse rifle. Well, they probably had to get clever eventually. Or desperate. He checks the countdown- one minute and thirty seconds left. Probably he should have kept his gun; he could’ve iced his hand to the trigger as a last resort. Damn it.

Then, on the other side of the wall, he hears the roar of a flamethrower, and his head jerks up, the inside of his skull turning to static. No. No, he was supposed to be away, Sara was supposed to get him out of here-

“How the hell,” he says aloud, his voice tight and thin with stress, “did he wake up so quickly?”

But when the ice melts away enough for Mick to kick the door open, Leonard can tell that his partner's been gone a lot longer than just a couple minutes. Sara’s still wearing her usual white, but she’s got Chronos’ pulse rifle in her hands, almost as long as she is but held with perfect balance, and Mick has on all but the helmet of his Chronos armor. There’s no way he managed to gear that up in so short of time, not even counting the fact that he was unconscious. This is a different version of them. This is them in the future.

_Oh, those idiots._

“Snart!” Mick roars, and turns to lay down covering fire behind him while Sara starts pelting across the floor to get to him. “This is a rescue!”

“I can see that!” he shouts back. “You shouldn’t have!”

Sara leaps over one of the fallen guards and does a beautiful third-base-slide onto the ramp, letting the momentum carry her into a roll that lands her on her feet next to him. “Seriously, you shouldn’t have,” he tells her, but she just scowls at him.

“Shut up and let us save your life,” she says, and slings the phaser over her shoulder so she can reach into the pocket of her duster. Leonard stares when she pulls out a _human hand_ , disarticulated at the wrist with a metal cuff attached to the end that has a number of wires and ominous-looking red lights poking out. She gives the thing a shake and the _fingers move,_ what the shitting hell.

“Is that _my hand?_ ”

“Kinda,” she says, and tugs on his arm. “Let go.”

“How about _no_.”

“We don’t have _time_ for this!” she shouts, and pulls harder at his elbow. Damn, she’s strong. “Leonard. C’mon. Just- just _trust us,_ okay? Please.”

If he argues, they’re just going to stay here until it blows in an attempt to change his mind. There’s no way to save them except-

“Alright,” he says, and lets go. The Oculus immediately gives a satisfied beep, but Sara’s already jostling him out of the way and shoving the dismembered hand into the opening. There’s a breathless few seconds of maneuvering, but then she’s able to jam the thing’s forefinger down on the trigger and flips a switch on the control unit on the wrist. When she withdraws, the hand stays frozen, holding down the trigger. The countdown resumes.

“Mother _fucker,_ ” Sara says breathlessly, looking at it like she wasn’t a hundred percent sure it worked. “Full lockdown on my mark, control code Alpha-Sierra-India-Lima. _Mark._ ” A kinetic bubble of the sort the _Waverider_ uses to seal minor hull breaches flares to life around the opening to the bomb, and she pulls off her gun and tosses it to him before taking out her batons. “Mick!”

“Time to move!” Mick shouts back, and the two of them leap off the platform, Sara landing a half-stride ahead and already moving, fast and low to the ground with her ground-eating stride. Leonard stays hard on her heels, picking off a couple guards as he skids through the doorway that Mick slams behind them. His partner turns and fuses the doors into a single piece of molten slag with a blast from his gun, then grins at Leonard.

“Hey, boss.”

“Time for greetings later, we’ve got less than a minute,” Sara says, and hurls a knife into the eye of a guard creeping up on their left. She takes off down the walkway, batons a silver blur in her hands, cutting her way through the loose knot of guards in her way. Mick and Leonard exchange a look and follow.

The crunch of metal against bone contrasts with the crackle of the flamethrower and Mick’s laugh as guards drop, screaming. Leonard concentrates on keeping up and picking off the strays trying to blockade the entrance to the ship- which is another surprise all of its own. Not the jumpship. Not the _Waverider._ But very familiar nonetheless, after it pursued them through three separate decades and the temporal zone. The ship where Mick imprisoned him. Chronos’ ship.

“Initiate remote launch sequence, Sara Lance override!” The lights cut on in the ship ahead of them, the engine spinning up with an ominous whir. The launch bay starts creaking open, and Sara, still a few yards ahead of them, turns sideways to slide through it without breaking stride, the ends of her coat brushing the doors as they fold outwards. Mick’s only a few seconds behind her and spins to put his back to the door, laying down covering fire. Leonard follows suit until Mick grabs him by the shoulder and forcibly shoves him through the doorway, getting off two more shots before he does the same, slapping the button to close the doors behind them. Both of them keep firing steadily until the doors are fully closed, then stagger as the ship gives a drunken lurch under their feet and starts to lift.

“We’re gonna want to hang onto something,” Mick tells him, and that seems like a great idea to Leonard. They both grab onto the cargo bars, locking on as tight as they can, and grit their teeth through thirty bone-rattling seconds as the ship launches up into the artificial atmosphere. There’s a distant _boom_ and the ship shudders all over, and then his vision smears into nothing and they’re _gone._

The abrupt silence that follows is cut through by the warning wail of a lone damage siren. Wordlessly, Mick reaches up and slaps it off.

Sara’s voice comes through the loudspeaker over their heads. “Everyone intact back there?”

Mick just gives a thumbs-up at the corner where a camera presumably hangs. Leonard clears his throat and finds that he does still have his voice, after all. “Shaken but not stirred,” he says, and is pleasantly surprised to find that he’s speaking English. No dysphasia. “We’re fine.”

“Good to hear it. Come on up to the bridge when you find your sea legs and we’ll get this tub moving.”

Mick rolls his eyes. “On our way,” he tells her, and then looks over at Leonard, jerks his chin towards the entry hatch. “After you.”

Leonard trusts Mick at his back more than most even when his partner _hasn't_ just pulled him from the brink of death, but he doesn't do well with having people behind him in stressful situations. This definitely qualifies. “Age before beauty.”

Mick snorts and scrubs a gauntleted hand over the top of his head, then looks down at his hand in annoyance, presumably at the reminder that he's wearing armor. "Didn't go to all this trouble just to shoot you in the back, Snart."

"Didn't think you did," Leonard says, and doesn't move.

Mick shakes his head, something like fondness on his craggy face. "Dunno why I expected you'd be any different," he sighs, and turns to head out the hatch. Leonard falls in half a stride behind him.

"I don't either. It's only been five minutes."

"For you," Mick says, not looking over. It's hard to tell, Leonard not having more than a passing familiarity what it sounds like in his partner's deep voice, but if he had to guess, he'd say Mick sounds almost sad. "It's been a bit longer for us."

**~*~**

The stairs spit them out on the upper level, and Leonard follows Mick through the twisting metal hallway, pausing only at the gun rack to trade Chronos' pulse rifle for his cold gun, racked helpfully where Mick left it last time. Leonard slides it into his holster and gives it an approving pat, eyeing the railing where he'd lost his hand with a jaundiced eye. The empty handcuffs still dangle from the railing, with a dark stain underneath from where the shattered remains of his hand must have finally melted. However long they’ve gone on without him, nobody’s spent much time cleaning up. At least the cleaning bots got the... solid matter removed. Some things no man should have to face, even if he did get a nifty replacement.

The bridge is much as he remembers it, circular and cramped and lit an ominous green, with a series of monitors instead of a viewscreen and central CDC station where the holotable and crew seating would be on the _Waverider._ Sara is leaning hipshot against it, rapidly flipping through data that shows on the wall monitors: star charts, damage reports, and timeline data, all fast enough that he can't get a good look. He clears his throat in the doorway, getting her attention where Mick's heavy tread hadn't, and when she looks up to see them, her smile is so- It’s so-

“So how bad did you break my ship?” Mick rumbles next to him, and Sara looks away, the bright joy on her face easing down into a more muted affection that nonetheless is not something Leonard’s used to seeing her turn on his partner. Kendra, sometimes. Rip, when he’s kept his idiocy to a minimum. Him, on a particularly good day, or if he’s done something appropriately clever. But she and Mick aren’t that close.

Or they hadn’t been.

“It’s not just your ship anymore, hotshot,” Sara shoot back easily, shutting down the CDC with a wave of her hand and handing off a tablet to Mick as he ambles over. The monitors all flip back to the churning green of the temporal zone outside. “The shields held when we jumped in, but they got a few holes in us on the way back up. Nothing Geoffrey can't handle with the repair drones, but it'll take a few hours at least before it's safe to bring the engines back to full."

Mick looks up from the damage report and smirks at her, the slope of his mouth breathlessly familiar and tremendously foreign, all at once. “Not like we're in a hurry."

A dimple flirts in the corner of Sara’s cheek as she smirks back. “Not at all. This _is_ a timeship."

For a moment, Leonard feels curiously out of place: not as if they've forgotten his presence, exactly, but more unconsciously exclusionary, like they’re used to having conversations that don’t concern anyone else. He's familiar with the phenomenon, though uncomfortably less so with being on this side of things. They make quite a striking picture, standing next to each other like that: Sara looking like a small pale shadow next to Mick, tall and bulky in his dark, alien-looking armor. _A study in contrasts_ , an artist might call it, or _Beauty and the Beast,_ if they were being particularly fanciful. But Leonard only has to look at their identical smiles, the way they turned naturally into each other's space when Mick approached, to have a different name for it.

Partnership.

"Speaking of time travel," Leonard drawls, and watches the way they turn to face him in tandem. Mirroring body language, interesting. "Mick tells me it's been a bit more than five minutes on your side of things, not that I couldn't have figured that out for myself. What I don't know is how long it's actually been."

"Six months, give or take," Sara says. "A couple weeks longer for us, but close enough."

"It took you that long to get back to the Vanishing Point?"

"Nah, we got stuck in a time loop a couple months back," Mick says, thumbing his print onto the screen and dropping it back onto the CDC. "Good times."

"If you call living in an engine room for twelve days, living off the same stale ration bars and bottled war and sleeping in shifts while we tried to fix a drive core rupture _good times,_ then sure."

"Wasn't all bad." Mick glances up from the latches on his armor and gives her a look from under his brows that if Leonard didn’t know better, he might call _flirtatious_. "At least we had a sleeping bag."

Sara gives him a chiding look and turns back to Leonard. "It was good practice for getting the _Pillars_ up and running again, that's for sure. Rip locked it down pretty solid when we scuttled it here in the temporal zone."

"Well, I for one am glad you did."

"Yeah," Sara says, her pale eyes going warm. "Yeah, me too."

"Eh," Mick says. Both of them look at him. "Less boring now, I guess."

"Jerk," Sara says, and shoves at his shoulder, laughing. Mick snorts and turns back to his armor, and Sara looks at Leonard, still with that fond smile on her face. "Fair warning, I'm definitely going to hug you now."

She takes a step towards him, arms spread like she's going to make good on her word, but she hesitates partway through, giving him a chance to warn her off. She’s observant enough to know that he’s not overly fond of being touched. The finest tremble in the tendons of her throat tells him that she would very, very much like if it didn’t.

“If you must,” he says instead, and she laughs quietly and walks straight into his arms.

Despite his resolve, he almost disentangles himself and steps away. It’s been… quite some time since he’s allowed someone this close without the intention of picking their pocket, and he’s been quite happy to keep it that way. But then her dusty-sweet smell drifts to his nose, familiar after so many long afternoons whiled away on opposite sides of a pack of cards, and he forces himself to relax, bringing a careful arm up to wrap around her shoulders in turn. In response she worms her way inside his coat and winds her arms around his ribs, lacing her fingers together in the small of his back and tucking her face against his shoulder, and despite his instinct to pull away, he decides that there are worse things than a beautiful woman letting you know that she missed you. He smooths one hand down the back of her coat in acknowledgement, and she makes an indecipherable noise against his collarbone and squeezes him tighter. He lets his cheek rest against the top of her head.

All right, fine. If forced, he might even admit that it’s actually rather nice.

After a moment, however, his need for oxygen does begin to make itself known, and he gestures at Mick behind her back: _a little help?_ Mick snorts, not looking up from his gear, but reaches out blindly and lands one hand unerringly on the collar of her coat, tugging gently but pointedly.

“C’mon, Blondie, let the man breathe.”

“Yeah, sorry. ” She lets him go and steps back. Her eyes are a little overbright, but she otherwise looks more or less normal. She intercepts his assessing gaze and huffs a laugh. “I’m just really glad to see you again,” she says, simply.

“I’m getting that,” he says. Maybe he is. He squints over at Mick, using faux suspicion as a cover for looking over his partner. There’s tension in the line of his shoulders, some unknown stress that Leonard can’t quite decipher. “We’re not going to hug it out or anything, are we?”

“Fuck, no,” Mick says. His head stays bent over the catches of his gauntlets, not looking at either of them. Bad sign. Mick uses eye contact in a show of dominance like the predator he is; this avoidance is a sign of some strong emotion. Mick and strong emotions haven’t, traditionally, gone tremendously well for anyone. “We’re going to drink.”

Sara laughs and scrubs her hands over her face. If there’s a slightly wild note to her laughter, neither he nor Mick is going to mention it. “Booze sounds like a _great_ idea,” she says. “Too bad we forgot to bring any.”

“Speak for yourself,” Mick says, straightening up, and nods at the corner. “Check the storage locker.”

"Maybe we should start calling _you_ the boy scout," Sara teases, and then laughs as Mick shoves her away. Mick goes back to struggling with one of the buckles on his chestpiece, and Leonard watches him for a moment before sighing and walking over.

“You want some help with that?”

“Fuckin’ thing’s been busted since the last time we were here,” Mick snarls, but he turns to present his shoulder. Leonard hides his smile and starts prying loose the leather strap.

"You know, there's one thing I wanted to settle, before we got too much further," he says as he works. Mick gives a wordless interrogative noise. "I believe you had some strong opinions about knocking you out. There were some very specific consequences, if I'm remembering correctly."

Mick looks at him- too close, way too close. Leonard can't read his face. "Afraid of the flame, Snart?"

"I don't share your fondness for it, no. Especially not when it's my skin at risk What was it that you said? 'Lay hands on me again, and you'll burn too?'"

"That was years ago," Mick says. "You gotta learn to let shit go."

Years for him, maybe. It's been less than a month for Leonard, and he still remembers the look on Mick's face like it was yesterday. "As soon as I'm sure you've done the same."

"I told you, I didn't go through all this work just to shoot you in the back."

Hmm. "So we're good?"

"Don't get me wrong, you shouldn't've fuckin' done it." Mick's jaw flexes, then relaxes again as Mick forcefully exhales through his nose. "But we're good. Worked out all my mad on Savage. Don't have much left for you."

“Fair enough.” Leonard gives a particularly hard tug, and the buckle reluctantly gives way. He steps back, keeping his voice lazy to make it look like less of a retreat and breathing a little easier without the press of Mick’s bulk so close. "So you finally finished Savage, hmm? Sounds like I missed out on all the fun."

"It was glorious." The tension melts out of Mick’s voice at the memory, leaving it rich with satisfaction. "I got to beat him to death with my bare hands and set him on fire. Best moment of my life."

"Hey, you don't get all the credit," Sara calls from the other side of the room. "I got to snap his neck. Kendra got to stab him and then Rip got to stab him some more. Everyone had some fun that day."

"Trust me," Mick says. He yanks the chestpiece off over his head without bothering to detach the pauldrons first, and then dumps the whole thing into a messy pile on the floor with his gauntlets. "Mine was best."

The shirt he’s wearing underneath isn’t the loose flight suit provided by the Time Masters, nor his usual double-layered henley, but something thin and mottled-dark that looks like an oil slick and likely has about as much technology in it as Sara’s duster. The latest and greatest from Star Labs, if Leonard has any guess. He looks away from the cut of Mick’s collarbone and says, "Sounds like you all had a busy time of it."

"You could definitely say that," Sara says, and emerges from the locker with a bottle in her hands that has a familiar peeling black label. "Is this what I think this is?"

Leonard peers at it as she comes back over. "If you think it's the former property of Yuri the Bear, then you are absolutely correct."

"How many bottles did you swipe?"

"The pockets on those bathrobes were surprisingly roomy." He looks over at Mick. "You got this out of my room?"

Mick rolls his massive shoulders into a shrug. "Seemed fitting. Plus, I know how Blondie likes vodka."

"Better than the paint thinner you brought back from Salvation," Sara says, uncapping the bottle with a quick, graceful twist. Leonard lets his gaze linger on her hands. He's probably allowed to do that openly, now. No secrets left, at least on his end. “You knocked out half the crew with that stuff.”

“Good times.”

“For some.” She raises the bottle, a little smile on her lips. “A toast.”

“Really?” Leonard says. “Oddly sentimental, coming from you.”

“I have my moments. I’ll keep it short, though. To those no longer with us- and to those we’ve gotten back.”

There’s a long pause after that- all of them have ghosts to remember. Then Mick clears his throat. “I’ll drink to that.”

“Hear, hear,” Leonard says, and Sara grins at both of them and takes a healthy swig straight from the bottle. For all the reaction she gives, she might as well be drinking water.

Mick swipes it out of her hand as soon as she’s done, and tips it back, his throat working as he swallows. Leonard raises an eyebrow after the third gulp.

“You could save some for the rest of us, you know.”

Mick takes one last swallow- pointedly, Leonard thinks- and then hands the bottle off to him, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I earned that.”

Leonard hasn’t much been letting himself think about the risks they’ve undertaken to get him back, how much effort and planning must have gone into it, considering that they’re here on their own, no crew and no _Waverider_ to back them up. He’s saving it for later, when he has the time and space to decide how he feels about it. “Fair enough,” he says, and raises the bottle to him. “Tvoye zdorovye!”

He takes a cautious mouthful, not sharing Mick and Sara’s taste for high-octane liquor. (Give him an ice cold beer any day.) But Yuri the Bear kept nothing but the best for his personal stock, and it’s smooth as silk on his tongue. He hums his approval and takes another, more appreciative sip. Not chilled, but you can’t have everything.

“You speak Russian,” Sara says. “I’m impressed.”

“I can drink with Russians,” Leonard corrects. “Not the same thing.”

“Possibly more impressive.” She shakes her head when he offers the bottle back to her. “I’m done for the day, thanks. One was enough for me.”

Leonard feels his eyebrows creeping up his forehead. Unlike Mick, he’s never had the folly of trying to out-drink her, but he was there for the aftermath of Mick’s attempt. She had to help him drag his semi-conscious partner back to the ship, and when they’d dumped him in his bunk to sleep it off, she’d still been walking a straight line away, whistling the tune the pianist had been playing in the saloon. Refusing a second drink isn’t like her.

Mick’s rumbled, “You feelin’ okay, boss?” confirms that he’s right to be concerned- and raises a whole other set of issues, as well. Leonard’s never heard him call anyone ‘boss’ but himself, and even then it’s sarcastic more often than not. He looks at Sara again, more evaluatively this time. He already noticed the hallmarks of a good working partnership between the two of them, but he wonders now if there was something bigger that he missed.

Sara smiles tiredly in response to Mick’s question. It’s only now that Leonard notices that her normally pale skin is verging on ghostly even in the low lighting on the bridge, freckles standing out in sharp relief and the skin under her eyes looking thin and bruised. “I’m fine. Just a little tired. I didn’t exactly get a lot of sleep the last couple of days.”

Mick shifts towards her almost unconsciously, hands twitching like he’s going to reach out before he forcibly drops them loose at his sides. Leonard eyes the tense line of his neck curiously.

It can’t be that simple. Could it?

“Because you stayed up programming the lockdown sequence. I told you to leave it to me.”

“One of us had to be in good shape to get us back to the _Waverider,_ ” Sara says, tipping her head back to smile up at him. She reaches out to tap her open palm against his shoulder, and her fingers linger for a bare second too long before she drops her hand back to her side. “Tag, you’re it. I’m going to go turn in for the night.”

“I see how it is,” Mick grumbles, but Leonard knows him well enough to recognize the sound of him complaining for the sake of it, rather than because he’s actually annoyed. “Fine. But you get to do the flight path tomorrow.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.” She turns back to Leonard, her smile coming back twice as bright, the exhaustion apparent around the edges now but no less warm. “And as for you…”

She catches his elbow in one hand and leans up on her toes, and behind her Mick looks away, and Leonard closes his eyes and he lets her do it. Her mouth is just as warm and soft as it was at the Oculus ten minutes ago, but the tension of grief that bound her is gone, and she’s loose-limbed and smiling, punchy with exhaustion and tasting like sweat and triumph and joy. It’s chaste, as far as kisses go, but when she gives his elbow a squeeze and rocks back down onto her heels, there’s a self-satisfied smile gracing her lips that’s far more attractive than any lewdness would have been. Smugness suits her.

“Just in case you got any bright ideas about dying to earn another one of those,” she says, her eyes sparkling.

Embarrassingly, he has to swallow quickly before he can answer. “Noted,” he manages.

She grins and turns away, brushing past Mick on her way past him down the hall. It’s only because Leonard’s watching that he sees the gentle brush of her fingers across the back of Mick’s hand as she goes.

He looks at Mick. Mick looks back at him,

“I have a feeling I’ve got some catching up to do,” he says, after a moment. Mick barks a laugh and scrubs a hand across his jaw, looking faintly surprised at the scratch of his stubble against the bare scarred skin of his palm. Mick doesn’t often go without gloves. Hasn’t since long before the fire that turned the rest of him into a Jackson Pollock painting.

“How much time you got?”

He makes a show of looking pointedly around the bridge of the timeship. “As much time as we need.”

Mick snorts. “Alright then,” he says, and grabs the vodka bottle back out of Leonard’s hands. “But fuck knows I didn’t tell her I’d stay sober.”

**~*~**

An hour later, Mick’s voice is even more gravelly than usual, and Leonard’s having a hard time remaining upright. Which is a bad sign, given that he’s currently sitting on the floor, with his back braced against the wall. He’s either way more drunk or way more tired than he thought. Or both.

“-and then we came and got you,” Mick finishes, with a shrug. He’s sitting down across from Leonard, leaning back against the side of the CDC with his legs stretched out in front of him, boots knocking carelessly against Leonard’s. Leonard has to fight the urge to fold up his legs to get them out of the way, feeling obscurely like it’d be letting Mick win something. “The timing was a little tight, since we didn’t want to run into ourselves on the way out, but we dug out the flight data on the _Waverider_ and we had two minutes to spare. The rest you were there for.”

“That I was,” Leonard says. He plays the bottle cap between his fingers, rolling it across his knuckles like a quarter. “Have I said thank you yet? I feel like I definitely should have said thank you at some point.”

Mick snorts. “That’d be a first.”

It stings, but probably not more than it deserves to. He’s used Mick fairly ill over the years, taken advantage and taken him for granted and left him behind when he wasn’t of use. Then again, Mick’s done the same to him just as often. It’s the peril of such a long partnership. They’re both crooks and liars, well-versed in the art of betrayal, and they’ve had thirty years to practice on each other. There’s a time, when they were both younger and far more cocky, when they did it for fun.

Now the thought of it just makes him tired.

“Well, thank you,” he says. Mick jerks his chin in acknowledgement. “Though you shouldn’t have done it.”

One eyebrow creeps up at that. “You’d be dead if we didn’t. Were dead? Whatever. Time travel is confusing.”

“True, and I’m grateful,” Leonard says. And he is. To both of them, more than they’ll likely ever know. Not just for his life, though of course he’s quite happy not to have been blown up, but for the fact that they came back. He’d have thought that Sara was more pragmatic than that, and Mick not so sentimental. “You still shouldn’t have done it.”

“What, ‘cause it’s risky? So’s everything we’ve ever done, Snart. So’s crime.”

“Not quite on the same scale,” Leonard says. And takes a deep breath, and lifts his chin, catching Mick’s gaze with his. “And I wouldn’t have done it for you.”

In the moment, it was easy to trade his life for Mick’s: a single punch, his finger on the button, a few minutes to wait. It was a good trade, and it seemed fair, after everything he’d put Mick through as Chronos. It’d seemed just. Besides, there was a good chance that none of them were going to get out anyway.

But before, when he was safe, when he had an easy out, he’d tried to take it. Of the regrets he doesn’t let himself have, that probably tops the list.

“Because you tried to leave us behind before?” Mick says. Despite his best efforts to keep his reaction off his face, Mick must see something, because he looks amused. “Don’t look so surprised. Sara told me.”

Yes, he supposes she would have. “I was quite serious about it, you know. I even pulled a gun on her when she refused to leave.”

“Told me that too,” Mick says, smirking now. “Doesn’t matter. You didn’t go through with it. Even if you did, maybe it still wouldn’t matter. You don’t leave crew behind.”

Leonard would never admit it, but his throat tightens, just a little bit, at those words. “You know I hate it when you quote myself back at me,” he says, instead.

“Not my fault you talk like you’re in love with the sound of your own voice,” Mick says with a shrug.

And _that_ has the ring of an insult he’s heard before, from other quarters. “Did Sara tell you that one, too?”

Mick smirks. “Maybe.”

He wants to ask- wants to know about the shadow of annoyed fondness on Mick’s face, the tension that rode between them like a live wire, the brush of her fingers against his. There’s novel’s worth of things he doesn’t know about them that were written in his absence, and he wants to read every word, find out every secret, until they resolve into something that he can understand once more.

But instead he asks, “Any other tidbits she shared that I should know about?”

The smirk grows more pronounced. “She told me you tried to hit on her six hours after you pulled a gun on her.”

Leonard winces and fingers the bottle cap in his hand, missing his ring acutely. That wasn’t his best timing, admittedly. But even the best-laid plan sometimes requires a bit of last-minute improvisation when the timeline gets moved up abruptly. And the Sword of Damocles has a way to making a man rethink his perspective. “‘Tried’ is such a harsh word,” he say, keeping his voice light. “Personally I thought that she seemed surprisingly receptive, given the circumstances.”

“She told me that too,” Mick says. His voice sounds neutral, but there’s something underneath, some emotion Leonard can’t quite put his finger on. Once upon a time he could read Mick like a book, familiar enough that he knew half the words by heart. Time and the flame changed him, made him unpredictable, the mission and Leonard’s choices made him angry and distrustful, and Chronos left him older and tired, filled with rage and something else Leonard never had the chance to learn before they went to the Vanishing Point. He doesn’t have all the codes to decipher Mick’s moods anymore.

Still, he’s fairly certain that he knows what this one is about.

“Listen, Mick-” he starts, but is interrupted, embarrassingly, by a jaw-cracking yawn. When it’s done, Mick’s looking over at him, something almost like affection on his craggy face.

“You should go get some sleep,” Mick tells him, his voice a low, easy rumble. “It’d been a while for us, but if I’m remembering it right, you didn’t exactly get a lot of rest the night before everything. You should catch up while you can.”

“Why, did you two leave in the middle of a crisis?”

“Nah. Wait an hour, though.”

Leonard can’t quite help his huff of laughter. “So things haven’t changed _that_ much, then.”

“Not really.”

_I bet I can think of one thing different you haven’t told me._ “Well, I can’t deny that sleep sounds like a good idea, but from what I remember of this tub, it’s only got the one bunk. Which is currently occupied.”

Mick rolls his massive shoulders into a shrug. “So share. It’s a big bunk.” His teeth flash in a smile. “Sized for me.”

Leonard has always been painfully aware of how much bigger Mick is than him, thank you very much. “I think the current occupant might have something to say about that. And I’ve seen how many knives she carries.”

“She won’t mind.” At that, Leonard abandons subtlety in favor of staring him down directly. Mick shrugs again, somewhat defensively this time. “She won’t stab you, anyway.”

“That’s very comforting.”

“She kicks you out, I might have something in the cargo bay.”

“You have a fallback plan, at least. I suppose you finally started paying attention to me somewhere along the line.”

“Nah, it’s more like self-defense,” Mick says, grinning. “Hunter’s plans are way worse than yours.”

“I don’t think I’m flattered by that comparison, actually.” He tilts his head. Mick probably won’t appreciate him saying it out loud, but… “Mick, are you-”

_Sure,_ he’s going to ask, but Mick cuts him off with a look. Any problems Leonard’s having with reading him, he can’t say the reverse is true. Mick seems to understand him just fine.

“Snart,” he says, his voice heavy, but still warm. Something like the ghost of a smile ticks at the corner of his mouth. “Go get some sleep.”

Leonard goes.

**~*~**

The bunk’s about where he remembers it, tucked down away in the belly of the ship. The door is shut, naturally, and Leonard finds himself hesitating, his hand hovering over the sensor pad. Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea. This is a somewhat bold move, even considering how they left things, and bolder still considering that he’s doing it more or less on Mick’s say-so. _And isn’t *that* a turnaround for the books._ Mick and Sara obviously grew close in his absence, for varying definitions of the term, but it’s not as if interpersonal sensitivity was ever Mick’s strong suit. Mick wouldn’t send him deliberately into a trap- not like this, at least- but that doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about.

“Apologies, Mr. Snart,” a warm, midrange male voice says from above him. Leonard doesn’t jump, but it’s possible he flinches very slightly. “But Captain Lance instructed that the door remain unsealed to either of the current other occupants of the ship when she retired.”

_Either_ of the current occupants. That’s very precise wording, and he suspects not entirely of the AI’s choosing. Sara could have left it unsealed entirely, or open only at her request, or open only by the ship’s other pilot. _Either of the occupants,_ however, is as clear a signal as he’s going to get.

“Thank you... Geoffrey,” he says, hesitating only slightly before latching onto the name of Gideon’s male counterpart from his previous less-than-willing jaunt on this vessel. “Please reseal behind me, with the same access controls.”

“Of course, Mr. Snart,” Geoffrey says, and the doors hiss open. “Sleep well.”

Inside it’s not completely dark- the same green cabling that lights the hallways runs along the baseboard of the room, dimmed low enough to remain soothing for the sleeping occupant while still allowing her to see if she were to be woken suddenly. They have the same lights in blue on the _Waverider_. Design, or captain’s preference? He doubts very highly that Mick cared enough to set the lightning scheme himself. If it couldn’t be used to steal or ignite something, Mick never managed to care much one way or another about how something worked _or_ looked.

Sara’s curled up on the bed, which is as large as Mick had promised, making her look even smaller by comparison. Facing the door, of course. He can’t imagine willingly putting his back to an entry point, and he doubts she’s any less cautious. Her long blonde hair spills across the pillow behind her, and her right hand is clenched around the blanket, keeping it pulled up almost to her chin. His gaze drops to the flash of silver on her bare thumb, visible now that her gloves are on the floor on top of the untidy pile of her leathers. He sets the pads of his fingers against the familiar curve of the ring, smiling faintly. “Gave it to you, did he.” Perhaps Mick’s more sentimental than Leonard was giving him credit for.

At the sound of his voice, Sara stirs, her hand flipping around to grab his wrist before her eyes even slit open. Leonard goes very still- of all the people he wouldn’t want to startle awake with him standing over them, she’s near the top of the list- but she just squints at him confusedly. Still asleep, then. Or as near as makes no nevermind.

“Mhmmick?” she mumbles, an upnote of a question in her voice.

“It’s just me, I’m afraid,” Leonard says, torn between disappointment that her sweet smile wasn’t meant for him and the triumph of being proven right. And the overwhelming feeling that he’s missing something important. Why the hell would Mick send him down here, if he and Sara are sleeping together? Mick’s never been the possessive type, but _honestly._ “He’s keeping watch on the bridge, as promised.”

“Mmkay.” Sara rubs her thumb along the spur of his wrist. “‘m glad you’re back.”

He has to swallow against the sudden tightness in his throat. “I am too,” he tells her quietly. “Mick sent me down here to get some rest. Would you rather I go somewhere else?”

“No, stay,” she says, and gives his wrist a light tug. The movement causes the blanket to slide down her shoulder, revealing a soft, overlarge t-shirt that Leonard’s seen a thousand times stretched over a much wider chest. “There’s plenty of room.”

“So Mick told me.” He sits down on the edge of the bed, and she shuffles over, leaving room enough for him to stretch out beside her without touching. "If you're sure?"

"Mm," she says sleepily, already curling back up, which means it’s about as close to an answer as he's likely to get. He shakes his head with a smile and props his heel on the storage crate to unlace his boots.

She’s asleep again by the time he gets settled, her breath coming in soft, regular little puffs that don’t quite qualify as snores. It's cold in the room, the ship temp down to conserve energy during the night cycle, but he doesn't want to wake her by trying to retrieve his fair portion of the blanket. He rolls to his side, giving her his back so he can face the door. He can feel the warmth on the mattress from where she’d been lying. The pillow smells like her cotton-candy shampoo.

It would be so much warmer with Mick here.

The last time he allowed himself to think that, it was when he and Sara were freezing to death. He thought about kissing her then- not for the first time, but the first time with real... _intent_ behind it, shall we say. _I don’t like you, but nobody should die alone,_ she’d said, and it had struck more of a chord in him that he’d ever wanted to admit. He’d be alone most of his life, metaphorically if rarely literally. _No man is an island,_ and all that crap, but he’d made a pretty solid effort. And look how well that had worked out for him: his entire life and the only family he cared about left behind somewhere in the time stream, his partner furious at him, freezing to death next to a woman who didn’t particularly like him but at least didn’t actively dislike him, which was at least an improvement on literally everyone else on the crew, including the partner he’d had for more than half his life.

He’d given her his coat, a moment of chivalry he’d been deeply regretting, and then she grabbed onto his arm, huddling into his side for what meager warmth they could share, and that’s when he’d thought it: _If Mick were here, we’d both be a lot warmer._

Folly, of course. Not because Mick had betrayed them- he hadn’t known that yet- but because Mick never would have been there in the first place. Mick wouldn’t even stay in the same room with him, if he could help it, and he’d never allow himself to do something as pathetic as huddle for warmth, even if he hadn’t been feeling unusually homicidal recently. Leonard had mostly been irritated with himself at the thought of it- that a lifetime of control was going down the drain because, what, he was going to die? As if that was any kind of excuse.

And then he’d looked down at Sara, at her pale determined face and her frosted mouth, and he’d thought, _Well, if imminent death is an excuse, she’s *right here.*_ In that moment, he didn’t even mind her almost bruising grip on his arm, though normally he detested the idea of people putting their hands on him. He might have, in his heart of hearts, been grateful that she’d been the one to reach out first.

The airlock unsealed before he could do anything, of course. And then there were pirates to deal with, and Mick, and he never quite managed to recapture that one reckless moment. But he thought about it, afterwards. For far longer than he should have. He’s never been one to hesitate when it comes to going after something, but it’s a lot easier to steal a diamond than a heart. And despite what his reputation would lead you to believe, he's always been pretty good at not getting what he wants.

_It'd be warmer with Mick here,_ he thinks again, and realizes that he doesn't have it in him to be annoyed about it anymore. Maybe the rules change when you escape from certain death. Or maybe, he's just getting too damn old. Thirty years is a long time to tell yourself the same lie.

“G’t’sleep,” Sara mumbles behind him, and then rolls over to throw an arm loosely over his waist, bringing the blanket and a wave of warmth with her. “Th’nk t’mrrow.”

_Good advice,_ he thinks wryly, and lets the sleepy heat of her unwind the muscles in his back, the unceasing clockwork spin of his own brain. All of his problems will still be there tomorrow, and none of them will be so large he can’t handle. He determinedly closes his eyes, and lets the soft sound of her breathing lead him down into the dark.

**~*~**

When he wakes, he’s alone.

The lightning in the room is the same- no sunrise in space _or_ the temporal zone- but he feels like he’s been asleep for about five hours, maybe longer. Sara’s long gone, the mattress cold behind him, and her blanket is draped carefully over him. He rolls up to a sitting position, scrubbing a hand over his face, and finds that his boots have been placed neatly next to the bunk, the laces tucked inside.

“Geoffrey, time?”

“It is oh-six hundred hours and thirty-two minutes ship-time, Mr. Snart,” the AI responds.

A little over five hours, then. Not bad. “Where are Mick and Sara?”

“Captain Lance and Captain Rory are both on the bridge, sir.”

“Thanks.”

He takes a quick spin through the fresher (more cramped even than the facilities on the _Waverider_ ), and wanders up to the bridge ten minutes later, hands thrust firmly in his pockets against the temptation to poke around. Who even knows what kind of security a Hunter’s ship might have? The _Waverider_ was only minimally secured, at least internally, but even so Leonard took weeks to work his way into the places he wasn’t supposed to go. He doesn’t think he has that kind of time here.

Mick and Sara are standing together at the CDC console when he gets to the bridge, Mick looming up behind her, one hand braced on the panel next to her and the other wrapped proprietarily around her hip. Both their heads are bent over the readout, Sara pointing something out, their voices an indeterminate jumble of Mick’s low, amused rumble and Sara’s half-laughing response. It only resolves into actual words when he crosses over the threshold.

“-thinking need to cut downwards at sixteen degrees at two minutes and nineteen seconds. That’ll get us around the worst of the temporal flare-”

“Cuttin’ it close.”

“Not in this baby.” Sara smooths her hand down the side of the panel. “She can take a little heat, can’t you, sweetheart?”

Mick makes an amused noise. “You pet me like that, I might even fix your shitty flight path for you.”

“In your dreams, Heatwave.”

Well, if he hadn’t had ample confirmation the night before, this certainly clinches it. This might even be worse than Ray and Kendra at their most nauseating- at least he _expected_ Ray to play the idiot. Any more of this and he needs to either interrupt or leave. He actually considers the latter for a moment, then shakes his head at his own uncharacteristic reticence. If they didn’t want to be interrupted, they shouldn’t be flirting on the bridge.

He clears his throat pointedly. They’re both too well-trained to jump, but when they twist around to face him, Mick’s hand drops away from her hip, and Sara manages to turn the motion into a sidling half-step away, making it look entirely natural. Impressive.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” she says with a smile. “I was going to have Geoffrey wake you up if you didn’t show your face soon.”

“It’s good to be missed,” he drawls. He searches Mick’s expression, but there’s no hint of the expected annoyance at the interruption. Hmm. “Finalizing the flight plan?”

“Finalized it when I got up earlier,” Sara says. “Just going over it with my co-captain, here, to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

Leonard arches a brow at Mick. “You?”

“Time Masters left me with all sorts of interesting skills,” Mick says, unruffled. “‘Sides, can’t be worse than your backseat driving.”

Now, that’s just rude. “I don’t _backseat drive,_ ” he says pointedly, “until _you_ start driving like a complete maniac when we’re trying to avoid getting noticed by the police.”

“‘Maniac,’ huh. Who was it that outran the cops after that diamond heist in ‘09? Right, that was _me._ ”

“Geoffrey,” Sara says, cutting off any further rebuttal. When Leonard looks over at her, she’s got her arms folded across her chest, looking amused. “Please examine the updated flight path and let me know how it looks.”

“Much better, Captain Lance,” Geoffrey says. Mick rolls his eyes. “Although I believe a point five degree increase in the first burn will completely remove us from the corona of the temporal flare.”

“Told you,” Mick says. Sara elbows him in the ribs.

“By all means, Geoffrey. Please review for any other improvements in the flight path and let me know when calculations are complete.”

“Of course, Captain Lance.”

“You’re quite the time pilot now, I see,” Leonard says, leaning back against the bulkhead and crossing his arms over his chest. “Are there any other new skills I should know about? Did Mick finally learn how to sing?”

“Fuck you,” Mick rumbles.

“Truth hurts, buddy.”

“You know what else hurts? My fist.”

“Threats of violence, from you? How novel.”

“Okay, seriously, were you two always like this?” Sara looks back and forth between them. “I don’t remember you being quite this bad before. And that’s including the times you were trying to kill each other.”

“This is _friendly,_ ” Leonard drawls, at the same as Mick says, “He’s showing off.”

Leonard bites back his instinctive defense and slouches more aggressively against the wall. “Is it so _wrong_ for a formerly dead man to be in a good mood?”

“It is when it’s this annoying,” Sara informs him. “I’m trying to work here. You guys are distracting.”

Mick leans obnoxiously far over her shoulder. “Why, is this buggin’ you?”

Leonard snorts. Mick used to do that to him, more times than he could count- until Leonard learned to get him off the same way Sara does now, with a sharp elbow right to the solar plexus. She doesn’t pull it, either- Mick gives a breathless little _oof_ and steps respectfully back. “ _Yes._ God, go make yourself useful and get the recall protocol set up, will you? We’re probably going to be ready to jump in a few minutes.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Mick says, with a familiar shit-eating grin, and deliberately knocks her against the panel as he turns to go. She hooks a retaliatory foot around his ankle a moment later, and he stumbles but catches his balance before he has a chance to trip.

“Calling it a draw?” Leonard says, as he passes. Mick smirks.

“Best you get with her. Don’t fuck it up,” he advises, and heads off down the hall.

Leonard settles back against the wall once more, watching Sara work in silence for a few minutes. He’s always liked watching her, over a poker game or the field of battle, it never made much different to him. She’s an attractive woman- not stunningly beautiful, perhaps, but full of character. She’s had an interesting life, and it shows in the lines around her eyes, in the wary angle of her jaw, in her crooked smile. Resurrection or good genes or both has kept her looking young, but all you have to do is look into her eyes to see that she’s far older than her years.

Which is likely a good thing, now that he thinks about it, given that he’s half again her age. Then again, so’s Mick. She doesn’t _seem_ the type to have a thing for older men, but the statistics are not in her favor so far. Although, to be fair, it’s not as if she’d have an easy time of it, finding people with shared life experiences in her age range. Or any age range. ‘Formerly dead former assassin turned vigilante turned time pilot’ is something of a unique qualification.

“You just going to stand over there and stare?” she asks, without turning around.

_Hmm._ “I might,” he says, but he straightens away from the wall, saunters over to her with his hands in his pockets. “I thought you said we were distracting.”

“You are,” she says, with a sideways smile that flashes her dimples. “But I think I can handle it.”

He leans his elbows on the panel across from her, careful to keep away from anything that looks like a button or a touchscreen. The last thing he wants to do is accidentally launch a torpedo, or something equally problematic and moment-ruining. “Is that so?”

“League training’s good for a thing or two besides the obvious,” she says. “I’m good at distractions.”

_Mm._ “I just bet you are. And speaking of distracting…” He lets his hands dangle down and taps his finger against the ring on her thumb. “I don’t believe this belongs to you.”

“Well it doesn’t belong to you either, boy wonder. You gave it to Mick fair and square.”

“And Mick gave it to you?”

She lifts her hand from the panel long enough to make a see-saw gesture. “Technically, I stole it. But then he said I could keep it, so. Six of one, half dozen of another?”

He can feel his eyebrows creeping up. “You _stole_ it?”

“Well, it was in his jacket pocket with his keys, and I stole his keys-” She looks at his face and stops. “It was a complicated day, alright. There were circumstances.”

“If you think this look is disapproval, you could not be more wrong,” Leonard says, grinning. That thought's going to keep him warm on many a cold night. Ah, if only he could have been there, to see Mick’s _face…_ “I didn’t know you could pick pockets.”

“Misspent youth. Not as misspent as _some_ , mind you.”

He resembles that remark. “Aw, did the cop’s daughter have a thing for the bad boys?”

“I’d try to defend myself,” she says, grinning back now, “but I think present circumstances would prove me wrong.”

“Just a tad.” He cocks his head to the side. “So... What are the chances that I’ll be able to get that back anytime soon, hmm?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She taps her thumb against the console, a pointed _click-click-click_ of metal against metal. “Maybe you can put it on your list. With… other things you’re planning to to steal.”

_Well._ The smile that spreads across his face has, on occasion, been known to intimidate somewhat less hardy souls, but Sara just smirks back at him, twisting the ring back and forth on her finger. He lets his eyes flick from it to her mouth and back again.

“It’s a fairly short list, at the moment.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of some things to add.” She plants her hands on either side of the screen and leans in a little, a challenging smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. “If you put your mind to it.”

"Well, you know how I like a challenge." He leans a little heavier on his elbows, bringing his face just those couple inches closer to hers. Watches her eyes slit partway closed, her lips part slightly on an exhaled breath, and delivers his _coup de grace._ "On the other hand, I don't want to step on any toes if you've already got a dance partner."

If he’s expecting her to flinch, he’s disappointed: one eyebrow goes up in challenge, and she doesn’t lean away. "You mean Mick?”

He was already about ninety-eight percent sure, but there’s something to be said for hearing it from the horse’s mouth, as it were. "That would be the one, yes."

Her eyes smile goes soft with knowing amusement. "I don’t think toes will be an issue. Mick and I don’t-"

"Excuse me, Captain Lance," Geoffrey cuts in, sounding about as apologetic as an AI ever does. “You asked to be informed when the flight path calculations were complete.”

“So I did,” Sara says with a sigh, and leans back to pull the information up onto the main monitor. “Thank you, Geoffrey. Prepare for jump as soon as Mick’s done below.”

“Of course, Captain Lance.”

Sara turns back to Leonard, smiling ruefully. “Okay, so bad timing is apparently our curse.”

Leonard wants to reach across and shake her, pull the answers out of her- _Mick and you don’t *what?*-_ but he knows the time isn’t right. Later. Definitely later. “There are worse things,” he says, with a smile that says _no hard feelings._ It’s even mostly genuine. “We can continue this conversation back on the _Waverider._ ”

“Definitely,” she says, smiling back. “But first-”

She reaches up, fists a hand in the front of his shirt, which is a thing that he will cherish in his memory forever- and pulls him down into a kiss.

_Third time’s the charm,_ he finds himself thinking, leaning hard against the panel to keep from overbalancing. If their first kiss was heavy with grief and regret, and their second punchy with exhaustion and relief, this one is warm, a little dirty, and full of promise. Her tongue teases against his briefly, then retreats until he leans in to chase it, earning a nip that makes his hands flex hard against cold metal.

She finishes with a little suck to his lower lip that he’s _definitely_ going to be thinking about later, then lets him go and leans back, smiling. Her face is warm with muted affection.

“Things with Mick only need to get as complicated as you want them to be,” she says. “Keep it in mind.”

_What the *hell* is that supposed to mean?_ “I’ll do that.”

“Good.” She lets go of his shirt and smooths it back down against his chest with a little pat. “Now that we’ve got that settled, can you do me a favor and check on him? He left his comm behind again.”

He can’t tell if she’s sending him away because she’s flustered, because she’s trying to make a point, or simply because it’s efficient. She definitely doesn’t _seem_ flustered, but he doesn’t know the lay of the land well enough to make a determination between the other two. “Can’t Geoffrey ask him?”

“The last time Geoffrey bothered Mick while he was working, he threw a knife into the speaker. It’s still up there.”

That does sound like Mick. “Fair enough. Captain,” he says, and gives her his most ironic salute. She shakes her head and looks back down at the screen, but not before he sees the little smile that flirts across her lips. He shoves his hands in his pockets and heads off, pointedly whistling. Behind him, he can hear the soft breath of her chuckle.

One down, one to go.

The engine room is even more cramped than the one on the _Waverider,_ but it’s tidier, without the tools and half-finished experimental modifications their fellow crewmates tend to leave strewn around. It’s also darker, and Leonard has to blink a couple times before he spots Mick, wedged into a corner with one booted foot braced against the exhaust fan. His goggles are on and his left glove is clenched between his teeth, and he’s doing something with a boot knife and a pair of pliers inside an open wall panel, cursing quietly but fervently when a wire spits sparks at his bare fingers.

“You look like an OSHA hazard poster,” Leonard informs him.

“F’k off,” Mick mumbles. “‘m alm’st-” He gives a frustrated growl, then turns and spits his glove to the side, catching it between his knee and the wall and squinting back into the panel. “Almost done.”

Leonard makes himself comfortable in the doorway. “You’re lucky that thing’s not on fire.”

“Would improve the wiring in this cocksucking system,” Mick grunts. He drops the knife and reaches in with his right hand, twisting quickly at the recalcitrant bit of wire. “Got you, bitch! Just try shorting on me now.”

Leonard shoves his hands in his pockets and keeps his gaze on the side of Mick’s face instead of the flex of muscle in his bicep as he wrestles the panel back onto the wall. “Sara sent me to find out what was taking you so long. Of course, I don’t think she expected me to find you elbow-deep in the ship.”

“Not my fault the cunting system shorted out for the fiftieth goddamn-” He cuts himself off with an annoyed grunt and fastens the panel back onto the wall with four quick presses of the bolt gun, then presses his palm to the screen. There’s a long pause, and then it flares green as it boots up. “Finally!” Leonard politely applauds. “Ah, fuck off.”

“No, I’m very impressed,” Leonard assures him. “And here I thought you only went to shop class because they had welding torches.”

“I’ve got layers.” The screen blinks softly, informing them that the reboot is complete, and Mick presses his thumb to the lock screen, letting it read his biometrics. “Who the fuck you think repaired this boat the first couple times you idiots got it shot up?”

“ _We_ idiots,” Leonard corrects. “You were with us then, too. In fact, I distinctly remember you being the one to hit… well, _you_ with a car, the first time Chronos attacked. What was that like from the other side?”

“What the hell you think it’s like? Like getting hit by a car.” The screen beeps at him softly, acknowledging his access, and he keys open an input screen and starts typing. “It sucked.”

Leonard falls silent for a moment, watching him type. The code isn’t anything he recognizes- he’s fairly sure that at least half the characters aren’t even in English. It looks vaguely like Arabic. Maybe Sara can decipher it.

_Things with Mick only need to get as complicated as you want them to be._

“You almost finished?”

“Nn. You and your fuckin’ timetables." If Leonard were a lesser man, he'd think Mick almost sounded _fond._ He watches as Mick types one more line and hits _execute_. The panel gives a satisfied beep and turns orange. “There we go. Remote access for the next time we need to do something without the rest of the crew getting in the way.”

Leonard arches an eyebrow. “You forsee that happening often, do you?”

Mick bends to pick up his knife, sheathing it back in the top of his boot. “Don’t you?”

Well, when he puts it like _that._ “Suppose I do.”

“It’s what we’re for,” Mick says. He straightens back up, discarded glove in hand. “Us three. To do the stuff that others won’t.”

Leonard watches Mick tug his glove into place with his teeth, something vaguely like resentment in the bottom of his chest. It’s an old feeling, worn soft and almost comfortable with years of repetition, like an old t-shirt he can’t quite take off. _Things with Mick only need to get as complicated as you want them to be,_ Sara told him, like she has any idea what she’s talking about. Like she has any idea how complicated things have always been between them.

“Is that why you went and got me back, then? For the good of the team?”

He means to say it lightly, but even to his own ear it comes out more bitter than joking. Mick looks up slowly from the catch on his glove, a heavy frown on his craggy face.

"’Course not. That was for us.”

It’s probably the closest thing to an emotional declaration he’s ever heard from Mick. (Or at the closest thing he’s ever heard sober. He can’t quite count the time Mick got drunk and said some stuff about him being a hero and bolted, seeing as Mick didn’t remember it the next time they saw each other.) He knew, when he saw the two of them come through that door, that they weren’t doing it for the mission. That they were there out of desire, not necessity. It was the only thing that made sense.

But he had to be sure.

“‘Us,’” he quotes softly. “Meaning you and me? Or you and her?”

“Snart,” Mick laughs, dropping a heavy arm around his shoulder. Leonard inhales sharply against the sudden weight and warmth of it, the familiar smell of hot metal and ozone. But he doesn’t move away. “Why can’t it be both?”

**Author's Note:**

> Why couldn't I have made it easy on myself and had Leonard and Mick have a pre-established relationship, _why_. There's just something about Leonard being weirdly repressed and resentful about it that fills me with joy, I guess.
> 
> I'm [sorrelchestnut](http://sorrelchestnut.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, come say hi!


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